MGMT

Steve sits down with Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben GoldwasserI’ve discovered a lot of great music, since signing on to CONFRONT. One of my favourite discoveries was made back in January when, in my search for interesting new content to review, I came upon MGMT’s spectacular ‘Oracular Spectacular’.

The music defied description and the sound was wholly original. MGMT seemed to come completely out of nowhere, their hit single “Time To Pretend” shooting up the charts and taking pop culture by storm; they performed on Letterman, then O’Brien, and the song was used in the opener of the films ‘21′ and ‘Sex Drive’, as well as the television shows ‘Gossip Girl’ and ‘90210′.

The song also caused controversy when its satirical lyrics were misconstrued by some conservative groups as glamorising sex and drug abuse. It was a classic example of the paranoid hysterics of the right, as they lashed out at MGMT for a song that was never meant to be anything other than ironic.

I had the opportunity to sit down (briefly) with the guys behind MGMT, Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser when they came to Montreal with the Osheaga Music Festival, and though our interview was brief, it was a fun and interesting conversation.

Confront: So, how do you like Montreal?

Andrew: It’s always fun/ I like this place; it’s pretty, with pretty people and good food.

Ben: I grew up two hours south of here, on the New York side, so we used to come up here and hang out a lot. And then when I turned 18 and I could drink in Canada, obviously…

Confront: In basically three years you guys have gone from touring with an Indie EP to performing on Letterman and Conan Obrien; your song opened ‘21′ and on the season finale of ‘Gossip Girl’; you’ve played with Of Montreal, Beck, Radiohead and you’ve played at a whole bunch of festivals…do you guys ever look back and wonder how you got to this point?

Andrew: Yeah, it never makes sense to us; it’s all bizarre to us, and we are always wondering how it happened.

Ben: We’re still a little bit confused. We’re really happy that people like our music but we’ve always thought of ourselves as being very strange people, so to be accepted on a mainstream level like this is music to us.

Confront: Obviously, it’s been three years already, but have you guys had trouble adjusting to life as pop stars? Has it been a culture shock?

Andrew: I think that not reading any of our press or anything like that is good. We’re kind of just going from city to city and playing our shows, and not really paying attention to what other people are saying. I know that we don’t really consider ourselves as pop stars, so it’s weird to hear someone say that. I think we’re just doing a good job of going with whatever’s happening.

Confront: When ‘Time To Pretend’ came out on iTunes and there was that controversy because some people didn’t quite get that the lyrics were satirical; do you guys still get any backlash over that?

Andrew: Not so much. I think that initially, yes we were. And there are still some people who ask us, “So do you guys really live like that?” But I think in general people are starting to understand. I guess for a lot of people that song was the first thing that they knew about us, so they didn’t know what we looked like or acted like or anything about us as human beings other than that song, so I guess it was kind of hard to see the irony in it, or something.

Confront: Well, what’s happened that people don’t pick up on satire anymore? It just seems everything is taken literally by the general public.

Andrew: That’s a good question.

Ben: We live in the New York area, which is one of the most sarcastic places in the world, though.

Andrew: It is an interesting point, I mean, we were definitely more quickly understood in Europe, so maybe it’s just something about America that uh…I don’t know what, but it’s weird. Because there’s a lot of the humour on TV over there that’s just dry, deadpan humour.

Ben: I think that so much mass media that I’ve seen-I don’t really watch TV that much, but it seems like whenever I turn it on, it seems like there’s a panel of experts sitting there, like “Okay, most people aren’t going to get this so we need to make it a little more obvious and remove a couple of layers.”

Confront: More people should tune into Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Ben: Yeah; they have a sense of irony.

Confront: You said in another interview that you signed with Columbia, because you said that they gave you the most artistic freedom for what you wanted to do. That seems to go against every big label cliché that we hear. So, do you feel you guys are the exception to the rule, or do you feel that big labels just have a bad reputation?

Andrew: We were really sceptical when we were first approached by a big label. We never considered trying to get signed by a major; we figured we were never probably going to make it big and so we never wanted to attempt to do that. And they came to us and they kept telling us, “No, really, we want to be different; we want to go against what major labels have been doing,” And you know, it makes sense because major labels are going under right now, and they’re not-you know-people aren’t really buying in to the whole mass pop culture garbage that has been keeping them happy up until recently.

Confront: Well then, do you think that what you’ve experienced is more of a paradigm shift from the labels that are trying to encourage more artists to come to them?

Andrew: Well, I think that Columbia is making a name themselves as a label where more independent artists can find some common ground with a label. I think it’s definitely a step in the right direction, and they’re really listening and they’ve been great for us.

Confront: Your music seems to defy being categorized; it’s unique, it’s original. And yet people are always trying to shove labels onto what you guys do. Does it get tiresome to always get mislabelled or pigeon-holed?

Andrew: No. That’s been our goal from the very beginning is to confuse the hell out of people, and thus far we’re doing a good job.

Ben: It’s really funny because at first we started to take things really personally whenever people misunderstood us or talked badly about us. And then we started to realize that, first of all, there are people that really get us and we’ve met a lot of them and we feel validated by those people; and also yeah, like Andrew said: we set out to confuse people in the beginning, so we shouldn’t let our feelings get hurt when people are really confused by the things that we do.

Andrew: We’re confident in what we are doing, and we think that it’s doing something, so it’s exciting to confuse people.

Confront: Well, I just got the “Time’s Almost Up” sign from your handler back there, so one last question: What do you guys hope to leave as your legacy to the music world?

Ben: Well, I hope some really good albums, and hopefully we’ll have some kind of longevity and making good music.

Andrew: We really want to be in the moment and capture the moment, but we also really want to make something that’s going to be around for a while, so I really wish that there were more bands around out there who saw what they were doing as something that should last for a long time, so whenever I see a band that’s, you know, really going for it, it makes me happy.

Confront: Excellent, thanks!

MGMT are definitely in it for the long haul. Their next album, ‘Congratulations’ is due out in 2009, and it is one that I am looking forward to. And hopefully the next time MGMT is in Montreal, I’ll have the opportunity to sit down with Ben and Andrew for a little longer than ten minutes, so that we can really get to talking. One way or another, you’ll get to read about it here.

http://www.myspace.com/mgmt

http://www.whoismgmt.com